HOW WE CHOOSE GROUND

People imagine site selection as someone driving through the countryside, falling in love with a valley, and declaring: here. That is how you build a vacation home, not a production community.

Forge Towns treats site selection as an engineering problem with quantifiable inputs.

The Variables

Every candidate site is evaluated against a matrix that includes:

• Waste stream proximity — distance to cotton gin operations and citrus processing
• Zoning and incentives — manufacturing-friendly regulatory environment
• Soil and water viability — for supplemental community agriculture
• Logistics access — road and rail within 30 miles
• Natural disaster risk — historical data on flood, tornado, wildfire
• Existing infrastructure — power, water, telecommunications baseline
• Labor market — regional workforce availability and cost

Why Rural Texas

The first Forge Town is sited in rural Texas for concrete reasons. Texas has the largest cotton production in the United States. Cotton gin trash — the primary feedstock — is abundant, local, and currently a disposal cost for gin operators. The state offers manufacturing incentives. Land costs support the Community Land Trust model. And the regulatory environment is favorable for novel construction and cooperative structures.

What We Rule Out

We rule out sites that require heroic logistics, depend on a single employer for regional stability, sit in high-risk flood or fire zones, or lack basic infrastructure that would require massive capital before production can begin.

The goal is to find ground where the factory can operate within 18 months of site acquisition. Everything else follows from that timeline.